Mountain Biking in Taupo at the Craters MTB Park – Day 302

Today we are going downhill mountain biking at the Craters of the Moon Mountain bike Park.

For the first time in a week we are seeing the sun. And we are going mountain biking. Woo!

Laura is going to do some tricks cos she’s a professional mountain biker.

I’ve never done downhill mountain biking in my life. Oh yeah, Reefton.

Ok, second time I’m going downhill mountain biking. I can’t wait.

So as you guessed it today we’re going mountain biking, we’re hiring our bike from Taupo Mountain Bike Hire which is right across the road from the awesome Craters mountain biking park.

The Craters MTB Park is just about five minutes drive away from Taupo city centre and this whole dedicated mountain bike park has over 50km of trails to ride on.

Alongside our bike hire we’ve been given a map and every single different track has a different grading. In New Zealand, there are grades usually from 1 to 6 1 being the easiest 6 being the hardest. There is also colour coded on the map that tells you greens are the easiest blue is intermediate and black are the advanced. And let’s address the elephant in the room, we are not going nowhere near the advanced. Today we’re going to be doing a bit of mix between the easy and the intermediate tracks.

Just a side note to let you know guys that usually on almost every single mountain bike park you’re gonna be going in New Zealand you will find a wild variety of different tracks. There is going to always be something for beginners and something for advanced and that’s what I really like about mountain biking in New Zealand. No matter what you’re level is there is a track for you and you’ll have fun on the tracks.

At the Craters MTB Park there is a lot of pine trees and amongst those pine trees there’s a few native wildlife to be seen and that’s exactly what is distracting me right now as I see this cute fantail in the trees tweeting away it is so cute it’s also a good excuse to have some water and get back on the trail.

The trail that we’re doing right now is a trail called Hammer It which is an easy going trail it’s a steady gradient uphill and eventually making it’s way to some downhill sections.

Once we hit some crossroads we get a choice we get an intermediate trail to continue uphill or to go downhill on the Nail It track and cos that name is so awesome we decide to nail it down the Nail It track.

This is where the real fun begins as we start making our way downhill there’s a real mix of slanted corners and some quick drops as well to gain some speed but it is an easy track that we’re doing so there’s no real danger of going off the side of a hill or crashing into a bush it’s just super easy going yet still super fun.

What’s really amazing about the Craters MTB Park and all the bike trails around Taupo in general is the fact that it has volcanic pumice soils which means that it’s fast draining and you don’t really need to worry about the wet weather making the tracks too muddy. All these mountain bike parks and trails tend to be open year-round.

Speaking of other mountain biking trials, there’s actually a lot more you can do around the Taupo area when it comes to mountain biking. Also, from the Taupo mountain bike hire place you can actually bike along the Waikato River to Huka Falls and back again on a loop track.

Once we arrive back at the car park we have about a five minutes to make it back to our bike hire place but that’s really unlike us so we decide to make it a bit more fun and take another track all the way back to the bike hire place and this track is called the Tourist Trap.

So this gives me enough time to tell you a little bit about how to organise going to the Craters MTB Park. You will need to buy a pass for a day, a week a month it’s quite flexible and you can get it from the Bike Taupo website or you can get it alongside your bike hire at the Taupo Bike Hire place where we got our bikes today.

With that the track called Tourist Trap that we’re taking on the way back, it takes us into a really amazing redwood forest it’s a very different environment than the pine forest we were biking in before, we trees are much taller, super towering and and there is even more bird noise as we’re biking around. It’s a rather challenging track with a lot of sharp turns and I have to be honest Laura has a hard time following me but it’s still easy enough for beginners because we’re making it all in one piece.

That was such a quite bike ride back toward the place and we arrive back toward the street that we were crossing when we started our trip. Just the time enough for us to give back the bikes before heading toward our next activity which to be honest is just a quick pitstop we head that there is some awesome honey to be tasted and we don’t want to miss out.

Pretty close to the Taupo Mountain Bike Hire and Huka Falls in general, is the Huka Honey Hive which is as you guessed, full of honey.

Not only are we seeing the bees at work, but we’re also more importantly, doing some free honey tastings, and honey is kind of a big deal in New Zealand especially manuka honey because New Zealand is the world leading producers of manuka honey which has all sorts of health benefits.

Manuka honey is good for aiding wound healing, soothing sore throats, improve digestion, and treating skin like acne. And it tastes really good, especially made in honey mead which is the next thing that we’re tasting.

As we’re tasting the honey wine we ask how drunk can we get off this thing?

These three are 12.5% alcohol. The red is 11.5 and the port is 14%.

Needless to say that mead is actually quite strong alcohol and it tastes super sweet after all it’s made of honey so what should we expect?

After taking the time to grab a few more samples we are heading to the outdoor viewing area where we we can check out a real bee hive. It’s pretty cool to see them behave.

Check out the rest of our trip in Taupo tomorrow with our next adventure which is gonna be meeting up with one of my very good friends Casey and he’s gonna show us how locals relax here in Taupo. However I don’t like relaxing so I dunno how that’s going to work. But see you tomorrow.